Marching Bands -The Soundtrack Of Autumn

All across the U.S., the fall season is serenaded by:

…The distant rhythmic thundering of a marching band drum line puncturing the air on a Friday evening, somewhere on a nearby high school football field.

That sound speaks to me.

I played clarinet in my high school band, but we were not allowed to march.

Instead, we were relegated to playing while sitting in the stands in our street clothes.

I was told many years later that it was because the administration at that time did not want to spend the money to clean the uniforms. That definitely tracks.

There had been plenty of evidence that our male-only private school was all in on sports and academics but invested little in the arts. I was aware of this reality, but it didn’t stop me from loving game night.

Particularly at this time of year, I still think back fondly on the memory of manning the sidelines:

Right up close to the action, performing my various duties as one of the equipment managers for the team…

…and then racing up to the stands to play with the band at halftime.

At the university I attended, I did not play in the marching band, but I knew quite a few people that did.

I went to a number of games and saw the halftime show many times. There are two songs from over the course of four years that I remember from it.

One was “Through the Eyes of Love (Theme from Ice Castles),” from a movie about a blind figure skater, a song which the announcer described as a “haunting ballad.”

The other was Procol Harum’s “Conquistador:”

Arranged in the style of pop-jazz bandleader and trumpeter Maynard Ferguson.

The latter featured a blistering trumpet solo, played by a guy known as Moose.

Unlike most of us in the music department, he was quite the imposing figure, built like a defensive lineman. I once walked into the bathroom of our dorm floor, a floor which was mostly inhabited by music majors:

And saw that someone, likely in a very drunken state, had ripped one of the stall doors off by its hinges the night before.

The resident assistant had no trouble identifying the culprit, mostly because there was really only one person any of us knew that would have been physically capable of such an act.

Moose didn’t just play his instrument; he dominated it.

The highest notes that could be played had no choice but to blast out of his trumpet and beat that “Conquistador” solo into a bloody pulp.

By the end of it, no matter how far back in the stands you were sitting, you could see that his entire face was red, bordering on purple. The team lost a lot of games that year, but at halftime, Moose always stood victorious. It was both awe inspiring and just a shade alarming.

Flash forward to a day a number of years later: When for no particular reason, I started imagining how a marching band arrangement of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana would sound, never thinking that it could actually exist.

I recently remembered this thought, went online, and quickly discovered that more than one version of that very thing was out there.

It sent me down the rabbit hole of marching band arrangements of rock and pop songs by college bands from all over the country. I assembled a playlist, because…

…of course I did.

I’m listening now and getting really pumped up as I write this.

Feel free to crank it up, and join me in celebrating all things Fall.

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